One of the most frustrating thing about having my leave date pushed back five months was knowing I’d have to keep working the same sorts of shitty jobs that I’ve held since college. You know the type. Retail. Food service. Temporary jobs, with crazy hours and low pay.
Right after college, it was what I wanted. In fact, it was pretty perfect. I was living in Boston with some friends of mine and working at Starbucks, and for the first half year or so, I really enjoyed the lack of responsibility. I reveled in the complete change of pace from college. The novelty, and the freedom that came from not being invested in what I was doing.
After that, the more negative aspects of the job started to grate on me. The constant struggle to work enough hours and the resulting uncertainty in my paycheck. The dynamic this created with my boss (please let me work, please let me work. I can see why this is an appealing employee attitude for a corporation, but I think it’s completely unfair and demeaning.) The schedule that changed every week. The job requirement of trying to please every single person that happened to walk through our door. These were some of the first things that bothered on me. Later on, it began to be the sameness of the work. The fact that I was trapped behind a counter for 8 hours a day, usually during the best daylight hours. And even later on, it was the fact that I spent 8 hours a day with someone else telling me what to do. I made no decisions. There was no independence.
That said, Starbucks was still a relatively good job, for its sort. I still recommend it to people who are looking for jobs. And I’ve certainly run into much worse in the last month alone.
To start with, I’ve had no luck at all finding a full-time job since moving to Maryland, much less one that would have paid me the $10/hr I was making at Starbucks. But that’s to be expected I suppose, given that I’m living in a small town (google estimates its population at just under 5000) and am limited to the distance I am willing to walk (about a mile and a half). With that in mind, I found myself several part-time jobs, one of which was at a local coffee shop. However, in my third week of working there, my manager informed me that I couldn’t work there anymore because I didn’t have a social security card on file. When I told her that in fact I did have it and could bring it to work any time she liked, she told me they were overstaffed and that she would speak with me in a few days. And when I stopped by the shop the next day instead of waiting (how forward of me) she yelled at me and her husband threatened to call the police. I was dumbfounded, and still am.
All in all, I am so ready to leave this kind of work behind. I am sick to death of working in customer service and dealing with managers who have complete power over my ability to support myself. I know with absolute certainty that I never want to work in these sorts of jobs again. But it’s definitely been interesting, and I wouldn’t say the last two years have been wasted. Not at all. I’ve learned so many things.
I think the biggest thing is probably how many sorts of people at so many different points in their lives end of working in these types of jobs, for so many different reasons. Without really thinking about it, I had always sort of assumed that people working these jobs were either students, or possibly, just not very talented (I know, I know, how offensive can you be?). But really, that’s what I had assumed, without knowing better. Many of the people I’ve met working at Starbucks are college students, but many are also in their mid-to-late twenties, smart, interesting people, who for whatever reason need some sort of back-up job while they arrange their lives to be how they want. The other thing it’s made me realize is just how many jobs like this it takes to keep our country functioning. How many unfulfilling jobs with odd hours and no benefits or guarantees. Somehow, I had just imagined that people became ‘adults’ and automatically got a job with hours from 9-5 and a guaranteed salary. Of course, I knew there were better and worse jobs, but these types of shitty jobs and the people who worked them were somehow invisible to me. And that is an incredible oversight on my part. If nothing else, these last two years have been worth it just for that realization alone.
Nora In Mozambique 